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Thursday, September 18, 2014

Why I'm marching for climate action

One man is joining the People’s Climate
March to stand against “Alberta’s tar sands wrecking old-growth
forests.” What’s your reason to join millions of protesters trying to
save the planet?

I’ve long known how wasteful, destructive, and dangerous the process of extracting oil from tar sands is. You have to dig up four tons of dirt and rock to get one barrel of oil. Beautiful old-growth boreal forest becomes a wasteland.

And that single barrel of oil? It creates three times as much climate pollution as producing a barrel of conventional crude.

I spent four days this summer in Alberta, Canada, with filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and
First Nations leaders. We met with officials from Suncor Energy, one of
the companies most involved in extracting tar sands, and walked through
the dismal wreckage of what the company calls a “reclaimed” area.That’s
why I was willing to go to jail for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. But comprehending the brutal reality of tar sands mining requires seeing it firsthand.

We took a tour of the massive open-pit mines that spread across the landscape. We also visited with leaders from the Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree First Nations. The immediate environmental consequences of tar sands extraction have devastated those communities.

The tar sands are the most outsized example I can imagine of
misspent energy and ingenuity. About a fifth of tar sands oil is
extracted using open-pit mines — some of the largest strip mines on
Earth. But the other four-fifths of the oil is extracted with an even
more dangerous process.

Natural gas, which you can think of as clean energy’s antithesis, gets piped in. The oil companies then burn that fuel
to generate steam to liquefy and extract the bitumen. The bitumen then
gets separated and “upgraded” using massive amounts of water and,
frequently, toxic chemicals.

As part of this process, the boreal forest is fragmented,
cut down, or completely obliterated. And all of this happens before the
bitumen is diluted (more toxic chemicals) and then piped under high heat
and intense pressure up to a thousand miles or more to where it’s
refined and funneled into our cars and trucks.

Watching all this, I contemplated how much could be achieved if all
of this effort, ingenuity, and engineering prowess were instead directed
toward developing clean power? Why go to so much trouble to do
something so difficult and so destructive when you could invest the same
effort into something positive that can literally save the world and
power it?

That’s why it’s so important that, as a society, we increase the
pressure on our leaders to take action right now to advance clean energy
solutions and resist the temptation to drill, mine, and frack as if
there were no consequences and no tomorrow.

And that’s why I’ll march along with thousands of Sierra Club members and so many others in New York City on September 21.

The People’s Climate March will be the biggest demonstration of its kind in U.S. history. The march will include a group of people affected by tar sands at
every stage — from the First Nations communities who live in that
boreal forest to the folks who reside near the refineries in the south
and along the pipelines and train routes in between.

Together, we’ll call on President Barack Obama and other world leaders to take more significant action to curb carbon pollution.

After all, there are alternatives. A new economy powered by clean
energy is already taking shape. It’s creating more long-term jobs than
pipeline construction or the strip-mining of forests for oil. People
across the world are retiring coal-fired power plants, switching to wind
and solar energy, and improving fuel efficiency.

These changes aren’t happening fast enough, nor at the scale that we
need — yet — but momentum is building. Every day, smart people are
coming up with new ideas and innovations. But just think about what
we’ll accomplish once our civilization commits all of its genius to
making this transformation happen and stops working overtime to prolong
the use of fossil fuels.

Forget about “if we can put a man on the moon” analogies. Any society
that can conceive of and execute something as recklessly ambitious as
mining Alberta’s tar sands should find the transformation to a clean
energy economy a walk in the park.

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